Although the brightness of comets is notoriously difficult to predict ahead of time, scientists expect this comet will have a brightness similar to that of the stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper or Orion's belt (magnitude 2 to 3).

March 13 may be the best time to take an interesting picture of the comet because on that evening, it will appear just below the thin crescent Moon.

By the end of March, the comet will no longer be visible in the evening sky, but if you get up early, you may be able to see it in the eastern sky just before sunrise. However, by then the comet will be farther from both the Sun and Earth, and will therefore be fainter.

Comets are balls of ice and dust. As they approach the Sun, they heat up, and the ice begins to sublime—to change from ice into a gas. When that happens, they develop a coma, a large envelope of gas and dust that surrounds the solid nucleus, and two tails, a dust tail and an ion tail that consists of gas molecules ionized by sunlight. Each of these tails may be over a million miles long. It is because of the coma and tails that they become visible to the naked eye, sometimes spectacularly so.

Some comets, including Comet Pan-STARRS, follow an orbit that begins in the very outer reaches of the solar system. As they pass by the planets, they receive a gravitational "kick" that propels them out of the solar system. Their sole visits to the inner solar system are therefore our only chance to see them.

Others, like Halley's comet, have elliptical orbits, and return to the inner solar system again and again, although their orbits are sometimes so large that it takes hundreds or thousands of years for them to return.